Tenir la pose

Tenir la pose

Prominent figure in Québec feminist abstract painting, Geneviève Rocher has dedicated her practice to a revaluating of material conditions, pictorial and structural conditions depricated by the dominant value system in visual arts. Her work highlights the discriminatry connotations, not only in the choice of motifs, but also more insidiously in the medium, material and formal structures. Most recently, her work has been presented at Galerie B-312 (2018), La Nube di OOrt galleria in Rome (2015), Occurence (2012) and La Central Galerie Powerhouse (2010).

8 March 2019 to 13 April 2019

Galerie B-312 is pleased to present Tenir la pose the most recent exhibition of Geneviève Rocher. The artist first had recognition from her abstract paintings, her assemblies and her interventions on paper (painting, flooding, cutting, collage). This time she presents two series of photos Femmes and Rome. If her photographic research is relatively new, the pictorial is always called upon. A posture, a double action, emphasizing the ambivalence of spaces and plans, posing a tension between the hand’s and the gaze’s work. Between doing it and seeing it. Between studio space, intimate sphere and the outside world. Geneviève Rocher has always had this attention paid to rhythm, to the folds and the cutouts, the traces and the color’s marks, to the plays between negative and positive spaces. First serving as matrices with which she created patterns and rhythms in her paintings, her paper cut became artworks. They were presented in showcases and gallery windows acting both as a screen and as a grid where the gaps create a cropping system through which the gaze explores, between the full and the empty, on both sides. From that moment, she began to photograph her painted paper cut in various places, especially during a trip to Rome, always with the same accomplice which she decided to leave his hands on the photos to male visible the performative appearance in the maneuver. Photograph is no longer used here as a journey’s souvenir but rather leaves the journey acting as a memory in a human and artistic experience. The Femmes project, started in 2013, proceeds in the same way, but this time, it brings the women’s bodies into the pictures. She wanted to photograph relatives, friends, partners. She asked them too to hold the pose, a paper cut in the hand, and she photographed them from the back while models looking at a water point in a place where they used to go with the artist. This complicity is reflected in the sixteen photos forming Femmes and it’s this solidarity that links the feminist claims of Geneviève Rocher who considers that women’s place, particularly in the art word, will always be a challenge of visibility.